Here is my list of free, macOS apps that I have installed and use often. Many are also open source! When I first got my Mac I searched the internet for lists of useful apps but found most outdated. I decided to compile this list as part of a cleanup and "audit" of what's useful IMHO.

My Time Machine backups have started to take longer and longer to process and complete. I realized that excluding folders containing temporary, frequently changing and large files would quite dramatically speed it up.

I recently discovered an alternative to remote control my Windows 7/10 desktop PC, instead of using Microsoft Remote Desktop. This method requires a computer with a modern NVIDIA graphics card with GameStream and works with iOS and macOS using a client called Moonlight!

Safari 10 on macOS Sierra has a useful Picture-in-Picture (PiP) feature to playback HTML5 videos in a small "always-on-top" window, just like on iPads with iOS 9+. To activate, just right-click a playing video and select Enter Picture-in-Picture. However, not all web videos seem to allow this, as they pop up their own menus without the PiP option. Here are two ways to try to enable PiP.

I've updated my MacBook to macOS Sierra, and it's rather underwhelming and half-hearted IMHO. And yes, dear eagle-eyed reader, Apple capitalizes the Mac in MacBook but not the Mac in macOS - what a confusing naming (lack-of-)convention. Still, macOS is a better name than OS X (can you say OS 10 10.X instead?)

On my Mac, by default, the keyboard cannot be used to navigate and trigger dialog box buttons. To “fix” this shortcoming - enable Full Keyboard Access to use the tab key to navigate controls! But beware of downsides too...

I was recently at an office using a Ricoh Aficio multi-function printer. I downloaded the PPD Installer version 2.2.0.0 (dated 17/09/2014) for OS X 10.11 from the Ricoh Aficio MP 2510/3010/2590/3090 driver page. But no matter what I tried, the printer either could not be found or would print blank or garbled pages...

About a month ago, I discovered Apple had imposed new limitations on the free Apple Developer account. This limits the period that an app can run on your phone to 7 days (due to Provisioning Profiles) and the number of changes you can make to the project (not the source code, but Capabilities like App Groups).

Forget the complex or manual steps, or costly tools to get screen shots scaled down from a retina display. I have a shell script that triggers an interactive window screen capture, saves the screen shot (assumed to be 2x retina display), re-sizes it to 1x and compresses the PNG further! Best of all, it does not require paid software or Automator.

I opted to install Grav via the ZIP package, as documented here. My hosting provider does not give me shell access, so I would not be using git or the Grav Package Manager (GPM), but limiting myself to FTP or the cPanel File Manager.